Juror, Fascinated by Law, Is Now Part of Legal Tangle

After taking a few law courses at the University of San Diego and working five months as a paralegal, Kathy Saxton-Calderwood was eager to learn more about the inner workings of a legal system that she had only observed from the fringes.

“I’m very interested in the process to see how it really works,” Saxton-Calderwood said while being questioned in August as a potential juror in the second trial of Mayor Roger Hedgecock.

Two months later, Saxton-Calderwood is learning how the process works--to a degree she could never have imagined.

Based on sworn statements by her and by the lawyer for another juror detailing allegations of jury tampering, Hedgecock’s attorney, Oscar Goodman, on Thursday filed motions in Superior Court seeking to overturn the mayor’s conviction on charges of felony conspiracy and 12 counts of perjury. Saxton-Calderwood, a 28-year-old native San Diegan, has steadfastly refused to speak with the media since she left the third-floor courtroom of the County Courthouse in tears nine days ago, having just agreed with her 11 fellow jurors to find Hedgecock guilty of conspiring to funnel tens of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions into his 1983 campaign for mayor.

In her written statement, Saxton-Calderwood alleged that bailiff Al Burroughs helped her define the crucial legal term “reasonable doubt” and gave her an anecdotal illustration of the issue which was later discussed by several other jurors. She also alleged that Burroughs pointed her out to fellow jurors as a possible holdout for Hedgecock, and she said the bailiff drank wine and beer with most of the jurors and provided hard liquor to three of them.

Because of her and other jurors’ reluctance to talk since the verdict, little is known of Saxton-Calderwood’s role in deliberations while the jury was sequestered for more than six days at a Mission Valley hotel.

But the chairman of the Department of Public Administration at San Diego State University, where Saxton-Calderwood is a graduate student, and two men who supervised her work as a student intern for San Diego County described her in interviews Thursday as a serious-minded person, skeptical by nature, honest and conscientious.

Apparently shy and slow to establish friendships with people she knows only through work or school, Saxton-Calderwood enjoys reading murder mysteries in what spare time she has left between her 20-hour-a-week job with the county Office of Special Projects and the night classes she takes in pursuit of a master’s degree in public administration. She lives in North Park with her husband, a professional studio photographer.

“She is one of our better students,” Louis Rea, chairman of the SDSU Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies. “She has a quiet bearing, a professional orientation to her.”

Saxton-Calderwood worked for two semesters as a graduate assistant in the department office, a job for which she was selected because the faculty held her in high esteem. Rea said he was not surprised to hear that Saxton-Calderwood came forward with allegations of wrongdoing.

“I would expect her to be a person of convictions,” Rea said. “That fits in with her professional nature as I know it.”

He said Saxton-Calderwood is active in the department’s honor society and recently helped organize a panel discussion on the media’s influence on public affairs, a topic she also probed for a research paper completed last month. The honor society also staged a forum on campaign financing reforms, but Rea said he believed Saxton-Calderwood played only a minor role in that event.

At the county, where she worked as a student intern from early summer until midway into the Hedgecock trial, Saxton-Calderwood performed research for a study on the future use of two county-owned pieces of land downtown.

Nick Marinovich, Saxton-Calderwood’s supervisor at the county, described her as “very conscientious.”

“Kathy is a very competent, hard-working, meticulous person,” he said. “She’s somebody who takes her job very seriously.”

Marinovich said Saxton-Calderwood surveyed several other jurisdictions to try to determine the county’s options for financing development of the downtown parcels. He said she was good at following up when the information she was provided was incomplete.

“If she wasn’t sure, she’d ask questions,” Marinovich said. “That was one of her characteristics. If she didn’t understand something she’d ask about it.”

Saxton-Calderwood has not returned to work since the verdict. Marinovich said he spoke with her briefly before the latest turn of events. She said at that time that she planned to be back at her job by next week.

“I hope she comes back,” he said. “We have plenty of work for her to do.”